Friday, April 25, 2008

Scientists say they have unlocked some of the secrets behind black holes, the gravitational fields known for sucking up light and stars from the Universe. In a report in the journal Nature, US researchers say they have worked out how black holes emit jet streams of particles at close to light speed. The University of Boston team say the streams originate in the magnetic field near the edge of the black hole. They say it is within this region that the jets are accelerated and focused. Despite the fact that it is probable that a black hole lurks at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy, astronomers still know very little about these celestial monsters which vacuum up almost everything in their path, even light. Professor Alan Marscher of the University of Boston and his colleagues claim they have delved deeper than ever into their heart. Using almost every type of telescope known to humankind, Prof Marscher believes he has worked out where and how the jets - or blazars - are formed. Using an array of 10 powerful radio telescopes, aimed at the galaxy BL Lacertae, the researchers studied a black hole just as it was sending forth a blazar jet. The astronomers had suspected that the supermassive black hole was spewing out plasma jets in a winding corkscrew, and they say that their observations have now confirmed just that. "We have gotten the clearest look yet at the innermost portion of the jet, where the particles actually are accelerated," Prof Marscher said in a statement. University of Michigan astronomy professor Hugh Aller, who worked on the project, told Reuters news agency that the process of accelerating the material to nearly the speed of light was similar to what happened in a jet engine.

"We think it is focused by a nozzle of sorts and it comes out at us," he was quoted by Reuters as saying. However, the BBC's science correspondent Neil Bowdler says despite this breakthrough, scientists are no closer to finding what lies within the black hole - beyond what is called the event horizon In fact, if the theoretical physicists are right, our correspondent says, then we will never be able to see inside these strange phenomena.

Monday, April 21, 2008

GHOSTS have sex. This is the claim of Syed Abdullah Alattas, founder and chief investigator of Seekers Malaysia.

"We are doing research to find out their habits, behaviour, how they have sex and such," he said.Syed Abdullah said some texts on religion also mentioned naughty and randy ghosts.Dressed in a red T-shirt, a black leather vest and leather gloves and looking more like a well-heeled Mat Rempit rather than a ghost-buster, he bubbled with enthusiasm when discussing apparitions."The ghost-busting business is not cheap," he said, proudly displaying a high-tech sound detector which had cost him RM5,000."This can detect sounds from kilometres away."On his ghostly experiences, he said: "Some of it is so weird that I cannot tell you about it. It might also be dangerous for me." He did not elaborate.A "weird phenomenon", he said, was when one hears sounds never heard before or when one gets extremely cold for a second or two for no apparent reason or when one smells something never smelt before."You can feel it. Just because you cannot see it, doesn’t mean a ghost is not there."He said he had been interested in ghosts from the age of eight when his mother had read him ghost stories.Syed Abdullah, who was a business adviser before becoming a full- fledged ghost-buster, said ghost-busting was 40 per cent scientific and 60 per cent spiritual.He and his team have also penned a book entitled The 33 Types of Ghosts, which will be published next month.

Dr Chris Roe places a pair of enormous fluffy earphones over the head of a blonde 20-year-old woman.

He carefully slices a ping-pong ball in half and tapes each piece over her eyes.

Then he switches on a red light that bathes the woman in an eerie glow, and leaves the room.

After a few moments, a low hum begins to fill the laboratory and the woman begins smiling sweetly to herself as images of distant locations start to pass through her mind.

She says she can sense a group of trees and a babbling brook full of boulders.

Standing on a boulder is her friend Jack. He's waving at her and smiling. She begins to describe the location to Dr Roe.

Half a mile away, her friend Jack is, indeed, standing on a boulder in a stream.

Somehow, the woman has been able to "see" Jack in her mind's eye, even though all of conventional science - and common sense - says it is impossible.

Is this simply a bizarre coincidence?

Or could it be proof that we all possess psychic powers of the type popularised in such films as Minority Report?

That is what Dr Roe is investigating. A parapsychologist based at the University of Northampton, he is examining whether it could indeed be possible to project your "mind's eye" to a distant location and observe what is going on - even if that place is hundreds of miles away.

And though the research is not yet complete, the results have been tantalising.

His early findings suggest that up to 85 per cent of people may possess some form of clairvoyance - the ability to "remote view".

And he believes that with only a modicum of training we can all sharpen our psychic skills.

"Our results are significant," says Dr Roe.

"They suggest that remote viewing, or clairvoyance, is something that should be taken seriously."

It would be easy to dismiss such claims as laughable, were it not for the fact that an increasing number of scientists are taking them seriously.

While Dr Roe's work may appear controversial, he is starting to garner the support of eminent academics such as Professor Brian Josephson, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist from Cambridge University, who says: "The experiments have been designed to rule out luck and chance. I consider the evidence for remote viewing to be pretty clear-cut."

The military is also taking a keen interest. The Ministry of Defence takes the phenomena seriously enough to have commissioned its own research.

Documents only recently released under the Freedom of Information Act detail a series of experiments on psychic phenomena.

Unfortunately, the actual details of the experiments that were carried out - and what the conclusions were - are still classified, and intriguingly the MoD refuses to say whether they were a success.

They claim that releasing such details would imperil the defence of the nation, and what little information has been released is described as "poor quality" by Dr Roe.

"Their analysis of the data is quite frankly, woeful," he says.

But the very existence of such files suggests that the military are taking the possibility of psychic phenomena seriously.

In fact, most existing scientific knowledge on clairvoyance is based on other recently declassified military research undertaken in America during the Cold War.

During the Sixties and Seventies, paranoia gripped the US military establishment.

Strange rumours began circulating that the Russians had found a way of harnessing psychic powers and begun wielding them as weapons.

Psychic skills such as telekinesis - the ability to move objects or control machines using nothing more than the power of the mind - were apparently being taught to soldiers in elite combat units.

They were also said to be using clairvoyants to gather intelligence from top-secret American bases.

If true, the American's believed, it would mean that the Russians could discover their most important secrets and even control the minds of their Generals.

So in the early Seventies, the US military began its own top-secret research to try to close the "psychic intelligence gap" with the Russians.

The CIA later joined them in a series of covert research projects that were given suitably innocuous titles such as Sun Streak, Grill Flame and Star Gate.

These were designed to track down the most gifted psychics in the U.S., unravel the mysteries of their powers and then find ways of teaching these skills to ordinary soldiers and agents.

The aim was to produce a new breed of "super-soldier" capable of controlling matter with their minds and gathering intelligence from afar.

But some in the military wanted to go even further.

The US Navy wanted to send confidential orders to their nuclear submarines using telepathy, which would be impossible for even the most sophisticated enemy listening devices to intercept.

And Major General Albert N. Stubblebine III, commanding officer of the US Army Intelligence and Security Command, suggested that one day soldiers might even be able to "walk through walls", using psychic powers to overcome the physical boundary.

And if that wasn't enough, researchers at Princeton University (where Einstein was once based) and Stanford were similarly tasked with investigating the paranormal.

Scientists at Stanford quickly focused on the use of clairvoyance, known as remote viewing in technical parlance, as the most militarily useful psychic skill.

Very soon, Stanford played host to more than a dozen psychic spies, whose paranormal skills were once demonstrated to President Jimmy Carter.

The remote viewers used a deceptively simple method based on what is known as the Ganzfeld technique to help "see" deep into enemy territory.

They induced an altered state of consciousness by seating themselves in a sound-proof room and wearing earphones playing white noise.

Pingpong balls sliced in half were placed over their eyes to obscure vision. The whole room was then bathed in soft red light.

The map coordinates of the "target" location would be written on a piece of paper, placed in an envelope and handed to the viewer.

He would be allowed to touch the envelope but forbidden to open it. Alternatively, pictures of the target location would be sealed in the envelope.

The remote viewers would then slip into a light meditative trance and their "mind's eye" would be drawn to the target location.

Pictures, feelings and impressions would then drift into their minds from the target, which might be located thousands of miles away.

To an outsider, this approach might appear to produce only hopelessly vague results that were no better than guesswork.

But the scientists investigating remote viewing found them to be surprisingly accurate, giving military intelligence a small but significant advantage over their cold war enemies.

Joe McMoneagle was one such "psychic spy". Given the codename "Remote Viewer No 1", his primary role was to use remote viewing to look inside Russian military bases and gather intelligence.

McMoneagle was recruited from US Army intelligence in Vietnam because of his amazing ability to survive while on reconnaissance missions behind enemy lines against seemingly impossible odds.

His commanding officers thought he was either amazingly lucky, psychic - or a double agent.

On his return home, he was tested for his remote-viewing skills at Stanford and found to have psychic gifts.

He went on to spend the next 20 years tracking Russian nuclear warheads and gathering intelligence.

His work eventually earned him the Legion of Merit, America's highest military non-combat medal.

"My success rate was around 28 per cent," says McMoneagle.

"That may not sound very good, but we were brought in to deal with the hopeless cases.

"Our information was then cross-checked with any other available intelligence to build up an overall picture. We proved to be quite useful 'spies'."

Word of America's experiments with the paranormal spread to the UK and while the military were sceptical, the Metropolitan Police spotted an intriguing possibility.

Could psychic powers be harnessed to help solve crimes?

They soon had their answer when a woman named Nella Jones came to their attention, claiming that she could help locate a priceless Vermeer painting, called The Guitar Player, that had been stolen from Kenwood House in North London in 1974.

Nella told the police that she had been ironing some clothes and idly watching the television when her mind suddenly focused on the whereabouts of the painting.

She hurriedly sketched it out and took it to the police, who were understandably sceptical.

But having nothing else to go on they followed the lead. The painting was eventually recovered from St Bartholomew's churchyard as a result of the information she gave them.

Again, it would be easy to dismiss Nella's guidance to the police as just blind luck.

Easy, that is, if she hadn't spent the following 20 years helping them ensnare murderers and other serious offenders.

"Nella gave invaluable assistance on a number of murders," says Detective Chief Inspector Arnie Cooke. "Her evidence was not the type you can put before a jury. But senior investigating officers have got to take people like her on board and accept what they are saying."

In fact, so useful was Nella to Scotland Yard that in 1993 they publicly thanked her and senior officers hosted a dinner in her honour.

Scotland Yard later wrote to her, saying: "Some police officers may have seemed sceptical of your abilities ... but it is a mark of those abilities that police turn to you time and time again."

Such anecdotes are all very well but there is statistical evidence, too, that proves that psychic skills are a useful tool for law enforcement agencies and the military.

In 1995, the US Congress asked two independent scientists to assess whether the $20 million that the government had spent on psychic research had produced anything of value. And the conclusions proved to be somewhat unexpected.

Professor Jessica Utts, a statistician from the University of California, discovered that remote viewers were correct 34 per cent of the time, a figure way beyond what chance guessing would allow.

She says: "Using the standards applied to any other area of science, you have to conclude that certain psychic phenomena, such as remote viewing, have been well established.

"The results are not due to chance or flaws in the experiments."

Of course, this doesn't wash with sceptical scientists.

Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, refuses to believe in remote viewing.

He says: "I agree that by the standards of any other area of science that remote viewing is proven, but begs the question: do we need higher standards of evidence when we study the paranormal? I think we do.

"If I said that there is a red car outside my house, you would probably believe me.

"But if I said that a UFO had just landed, you'd probably want a lot more evidence.

"Because remote viewing is such an outlandish claim that will revolutionise the world, we need overwhelming evidence before we draw any conclusions. Right now we don't have that evidence."

Back at the University of Northampton, Dr Chris Roe hopes he can provide such proof one way or the other.

Next month, he will embark on a series of experiments that will be more rigorous than any so far attempted.

They will rule out fluke positive results and any unconscious biases held by anyone involved with the experiments.

And if that wasn't enough, he then plans to embark on research into an even more outlandish field: whether it is possible to remote view through time.

In other words, he will investigate whether it is possible for remote viewers not only to observe distant locations, but also to see what will happen at that place at a predetermined time in the future.

"Time does not seem to be a barrier to remote viewing," says Dr Roe, matter of factly.

Certainly, only time will tell whether he has been cruelly deluded, or has glimpsed a very intriguing future.

Saturday, April 19, 2008

Scientific and technical teams from NASA and the European Space Agency are fleshing out ideas for the next mission to fly to an outer planet — either to Jupiter or Saturn. A decision on which of those two exploration targets will be the destination for the space agency's next multibillion-dollar flagship mission is expected by year's end. "We have the outer planet flagship mission in the (NASA) budget ... I do believe it will happen," said Fran Bagenal, a professor of astrophysical and planetary sciences at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. "I couldn't have said that four years ago ... now I have great confidence that this will happen." Bagenal is chair of the Outer Planets Assessment Group, which was established by NASA in late 2004 to identify scientific priorities and pathways for exploration in the outer solar system. In 2007, NASA completed a series of studies for flagship missions, honing down the list to the two candidate missions that now are under further study by both NASA and ESA. During a two-day OPAG meeting in late March, officials provided a status report on the two outer planet exploration concepts now on the table: a Europa-Jupiter System Mission and a Titan-Saturn System Mission.

Each of those mission scenarios has multiple components with both ESA and NASA contributing to whichever outer planet investigation is down-selected. The Europa-Jupiter mission involves two orbiters with instruments designed to operate in the severe radiation environment of Jupiter. In addition to ESA and NASA, Russia also has expressed interest in the mission, proposing a Europa lander.

Here's a link to Mediums being prosecuted if they cannot justify their claims

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7354089.stm

This is typical media's spin on it saying that it's all anedoctal evidence no mention of the cross correpondences, the newspaper and book tests, Gary Schwartz and Julie Beischel experiments on mediums, the proxy sittings, the willet scripts.

Here's skeptic Professor Richard Wiseman

Psychologist Prof Richard Wiseman has spent 15 years investigating psychics, healers and mediums and is unconvinced.

"Anecdotal evidence on their abilities is impressive, but if you put it under more scientific conditions, their claims tend to crumble. [Now] they will need to be able to justify the claims they are making."

They do? they did not crumble in the cross correspondences, the recent study done on mediums by swedish psychical researchers.

Friday, April 18, 2008

“if you look at how skeptics look at this stuff, there’s an almost unavoidable urge to make decisions that undermine the results. This can be unintentional. It’s just built into the worldview that these folks have, and it’s very, very difficult to overcome….”

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

psychologist Dr. Keith Hearne is a member of the Society for Psychical Research and heads the BBC's prediction bureaux for the programme Out of this World. He explains:

Premonition exists- even though it defies the known laws of the universe. Everything in the universe may happen all at once and our lifetime is but one segment of this wholeness. I predict that one of the most important questions for the science of the next millennium will be concerned with the illusion of time.

Here's an interesting case of a woman named Beverly

As we looked around the market my husband said to me, 'I've just seen a lovely dinner service on a stand near the shop over there. If we're quick we may just be able to buy it in time. As we rushed over to the stall, to told me that a strange old lady with long grey hair tied back ran it. The stall had the oddest collection of things for sale- most of them from the 1950's.

But when we got to the stall it was completely empty. Only seconds ago it had been full of waves. Perplexed by what had happened, my husband asked a man, who was sitting nearby selling his paintings, if he had seen the old lady and her stall. 'I couldn't understand why you were looking at an empty stall,' said the man. 'And who were you talking to?'

Further enquires revealed that the site of the stall was once owned by a little old lady with distinctive long grey hair. She had stopped trading in the 1950s. Did my husband have a vision of the past?.

user posted image rAnthony North: Big Bang happened like this. Once upon a time there was a 'singularity' that contained everything that was. Suddenly it blew up, releasing fundamental particles that expanded to fill space. Gravity came into being and particles came together into stars and planets. More complicated particles were 'cooked' in the stars, and were released through supernova, to form other heavenly bodies, and from them eventually came life. The theory is neat and tidy.: It came out of the realization that the universe was expanding, and when background radiation was found, identified as residue of the Big Bang, the theory gained consensus. Of course, there are massive problems with the theory. The 'singularity' is nothing but a mathematical point of infinity, with no physical validity, and the math of the theory means there is 90% of the matter and energy in the universe missing. Exotic theories come and go to account for this lack of universal weight.: Dark matter and dark energy are among them. Then there is the search for 'mass' in massless particles. It doesn't occur to science that the theory may be wrong. Previous to Big Bang was the Steady State theory. Here, matter was continually created, the universe renewing itself. But as no means was known how it did this, it was rejected for Big Bang, even though no one knows how it did this. Big bang fits western philosophy.: In the east, everything is cyclical, renewing itself, whilst in the west, we are linear. Things must move from a beginning to an end.

Hence, it follows that the universe must also have history with a beginning and an end. Is this philosophical mind-set the main reason we prefer Big Bang over Steady State? After all, neither can be proved. Of course, the argument is that background radiation seals it. But in other areas of science, it is accepted that nothing can have only one answer. It seems to me that big bang theory has got itself in a steady state.: And maybe it's time to look again at Steady State itself.

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

The Mediumship of Franek Kluski

There's only some that I think are genuine who ca demonstrate physical mediumship especially knowing Harry Houdini exposed a lot of them as frauds but there appears to be some are indeed genuine such as the one here.

On reviewing material dealing with physical mediumship in the last one hundred years or so, I am constantly surprised regarding the paucity of reference to the Warsaw medium Teofil Modrzejewski (1873-1943), who worked under the pseudonym of Franek Kluski.

Kluski, an educated man, a banker and writer, did not attract the level of attention that was given to such mediums as Daniel Dunglas ('D. D.') Home, Eusapia Palladino, Rudi Schneider and others. His short period of mediumship lasted only seven years; the amount of information detailing his activity is therefore limited. I am therefore indebted to the Society for Psychical Research for material regarding Kluski.

As a contemplative child, Kluski had experiences of OBEs (Out of Body Experiences), and seeing deceased relatives and animals. Relevant in view of what he would do in the future, Kluski recorded how other children, when with him, would also see those who had died.(1) However, it was not until 1918, after a seance with Jean Guzik, that Kluski's mediumistic potential was recognized and the spectacular seances began. The number of those attending ran into the hundreds and included a variety of people, e.g. professors, soldiers, professional magicians and parapsychologists; these undoubtedly witnessed what must have been some of the most evidential demonstrations of life continuing after death. Those attending 'were not the "usual crowd", but were totally random and very numerous', and 'the testimony left by many of these people is...an encounter with a magical world, that could not possibly be achieved using pathetic little tricks and sleight-of-hand'.(2)

During the period of Kluski's mediumship, the seances were conducted at different locations, and a lighted environment was sometimes present by means of a red lamp and a luminous plaque. There were over eight hundred occurrences of visitants, with sitters recognizing some of these as people who had died: 'They would start out as a kind of haze, and gradually take shape and become more visible, with greater detail, such as wrinkles and facial hair'...Great numbers of them appeared virtually simultaneously, and often there would be an impression of other presences'.(3) Prof. F. W. Pawlowski noted how the apparitions appeared at some distance from Kluski, and while some walked around normally, others would fly above the sitters' heads. Those who could speak did so in his/her own language, and it appeared that they could read the sitters' minds as they responded to what a sitter was thinking before anything was said. Some chose to communicate by raps, but the voices of those who did speak were reported to have been 'perfectly clear and normally loud, but sound like a loud whisper'.(4)

Kluski is also important to Spiritualist belief as he dealt a death-blow to Christian anthropocentrism (that, illogically, teaches only human beings survive death), as his seances enjoyed the presence of animals returning. Sylvia Barbanell cited Pawlowski's testimony that sitters experienced the materialization of various types of animals; he recorded an instance of a dog materializing and jumping upon the laps of the sitters, and in a seance with a red lamp, a hawk-like bird flew around, with its wings beating against the walls: this occasion was photographed. Validating a further feature of Spiritualist belief, i.e. that bonds of affection are not broken by death, when certain persons materialized in the Kluski seances, they would be accompanied by an animal that left as soon as their human companion departed. The significant feature, as Mrs Barbanell observed, is that the Kluski seances demonstrated that all, rather than some animals survive death.(5)

One materialization brought an animal that resembled a lion that would lick the sitters: this 'would stalk around, lashing its tail against the furniture and leaving behind it a strong acrid smell'.(6) Another visitor, referred to as the Pithecanthropus, was clearly intent on making his presence known to the sitters: an ape-type being, it moved the furniture and behaved 'rather roughly with regard to the sitters, trying to lick their hands or faces'; often the seance had to be prematurely ended when it became over- enthusiastic. Pawlowski related how it grabbed one woman's hand to rub this against its face, and 'this frightened her considerably and caused her to shriek'.(7) Those who came to the seances from 'the other side' would comply with requests to move furniture; despite being in darkness, they would do this without any obvious difficulty; one such instance was the moving of a heavy bronze statue. Kluski's seances may have been many things, but they were hardly uneventful.

Relevant due to the present popularity of the idea that communicators are really only fragmented personalities ('psychons' or 'mindkins'), Dr Gustave Geley, who participated in Kluski's seances at the Paris Institut Metapsychique International, and in Warsaw, reported how 'All these phantoms give the impression of being alive, and as normal as living people'.(8) Pawlowski reiterates this view, adding that 'They made a round of the sitters, smiling an acknowledgement of the familiar sitters and looking curiously at the sitters they had not seen before'.(9)In addition to the materializations, there was the appearance of lights swiftly moving around the room, apports and noises. Admittedly, Kluski was hardly a typical medium: he was not only a proficient materialization medium but adept at producing automatic writing, and deriving no financial benefit from this. He was also seen in different locations away from where he was physically situated, and was accompanied by lights and followed by noises and odours; apparitions would appear in the daylight when he was not even conducting a seance. Pawlowski mentioned how 'the apparitions' persisted in interrupting Kluski's sleep by walking around his room and going as far as illuminating themselves for his benefit. Pawlowski also referred to a report that he had 'no reason to distrust', that Kluski was not only transported to the seance room by the apparit-ions, but also transported from the locked room and found asleep in a another location. Furthermore, tests demonstrated there was a dramatic reduction of temperature in the seance room with Kluski present, and compass needles would move about violently when he was nearby.(10)

Kluski is better known for the moulds that were produced when materializations left an impression, these often being perfect in detail and indicated not only materialization, but dematerialization. Prof. Charles Richet and Geley conducted investigations into Kluski's mediumship in 1921, and secretly introduced soluble cholesterin into the melted paraffin wax that was present during the seance; this was to ensure that any impressions left were actually made during this time (i.e. by adding sulphuric acid, this would cause it to become violet-red and thereby identify it as the substance they had provided). Richet records how, when the seance took place, he and Geley held Kluski's hands and the researchers later found that the mould had impressions of a materialized child's hands and foot. Richet noted how experts testified to the occurrence being 'an absolute mystery', and concluded by saying that Geley's investigation into this aspect of Kluski's mediumship, 'gives irrefragable scientific demonstration of ectoplasmic materialization'. He added that as a scientist, he found the concept of such a thing being possible as 'very absurd', but adding 'Yes, it is absurd: but no matter - it is true'.(11) Would that researchers be so forthright and decisive now! There have been attempts to supply non-paranormal explanations for the many moulds produced, but I believe that people considering the subject with an objective stance would find these quite fanciful; or, as Mary Rose Barrington observes, 'scraping the barrel of speculation'.(12) For anyone wishing to consider the subject of the moulds, I would suggest the writings by Geley and Barrington (listed below).

While precautions did vary considerably, Kluski still produced materializations when strict procedures were followed, including instances when he was naked or there was a lighted environment. In fact, in some instances, the materializations provided their own light, or picked up the luminous plaque in order that the sitters could see them. Pawlowski reported how 'the light from the plaque is so good that I could see the pores and the down on the skin of their faces and hands'.(13) One frequent visitor not only provided enough light to ensure that he could be seen, but this also illuminated the sitters and much of the seance room.

The factors that seemed to diminish the quality of Kluski's mediumship did not arise through any controls imposed, but rather his health and the weather; storms appeared to cause him considerable problems. It was also observed that when Kluski was not in good health, the phenomena diminished, e.g. the materializations becoming reduced in size. After a seance, he was invariably exhausted, but also suffered from insomnia apart from the vomiting of blood. Some of his health problems can be attributed to a serious injury sustained through partici-pating in a duel at the age of twenty-seven. As stated, Kluski was hardly a typical medium...

While some Spiritualists may be satisfied with little more than odours, touches, winds, and 'the quick shake of a tambourine', Kluski is an excellent example of the true nature of Spiritualism and mediumship - providing a link between the two planes of existence and effecting a meaningful discourse between them. It is this type of physical phenomena, the type witnessed in NAS demonstrations, that should be the sole aspiration for all Spiritualists and Survivalists. The point at issue is the need to pursue and attain communication, rather than peripheral phenomena that do not edify; in the case of Kluski, it became possible for the two worlds to be temporarily fused, and for visible and audible evidence to be supplied in abundance. Surely this is the actual purpose of Spiritualism?

It is an absolute pleasure to read through the accounts of Kluski's mediumship; he surely represents a considerable stumbling-block for non-survivalists. I suspect that this is the reason why there has been so little discussion about him by the materialists who prefer speculation and wild conjecture rather than unbiased study of the subject. But why should there be such animosity towards physical phenomena, such as that found with Kluski? Simply because, 'They are both signs and symbols of a specter that haunts the strongholds of science: the specter of the direct power of mind and imagination to transform the real world'.(14)

Monday, April 14, 2008

Here's another interesting case I got this from the book called The Psychic Casebook- Real Encounters With The Paranormal By Craig Hamilton Parker I thought it was important to share it all with you here.

It's about a woman named Elizabeth Hyde after a severe asthma attack she was rushed to the hospital.

I vaguely recall waking in an oxygen tent and a lot of fuss going on around me. I don't know at what point I drifted out of my body, but I do know know that my heart stopped and I was rushed to the Resuscitation Ward. I could see myself attached to the ventilator with lots of wires connected to me. I could see a doctor, two nurses and bizaree sight of a man dresses in a bow tie and full evening suit.

Elizabeth then went into cardiac arrest, but witnesses the unfolding scene from outside her body.

I saw them all trying to restart my heart. I was in pain and felt no difficulty with my breathing. I was an onlooker, so to speak, watching myself in the hospital bed.

We had no telephone at home and I saw the police bring my husband to the hospital. Is there any hope? I heard him say. 'very little,' replied the man in the evening suit. That was the only moment I felt unhappy.

I felt myself falling down a tunnel and saw my life flash before me like a rapid series of camera pictures. Suddenly I was standing and feeling wonderful with a sense of lightness and happiness, and I knew that I was surrounded by a great love. Added to this was a feeling of tranquillity. I felt so well it was wonderful!

I then found myself standing to one side of a small arched bridge. There were people singing, not hymns but a lovely song of joy. There were colours such as I have never seen. I wanted to join them, but thoughts of my husband stopped me. There were also things that I still wanted to do in life., such as have a baby- but it was so very, very tempting to cross.

Standing on the bridge was a Jewish man holding a cross. He 'spoke' to me telepathically and asked, 'Are you ready to cross?'. I recall saying, 'No, No, No!' and then immediately returned to my body. I could now hear conversations going on around me in hte hospital. She slipping away,' they said. But I knew that I would live and started fighting the ventilator to prove that I could breathe by myself. 'Why can't these people see I'm not going to die>'

After four days Elizabeth was detached from the ventilator, transferred to a recovery ward and gradually got well.

The man who previously wore the evening suit when I was in a coma was now in a doctor's white coat as he walked into the ward. I asked the nurse about him. 'He's the surgeon who performed a tracheotomy operation on you to try and save your life,' said the nurse. ' I Know.' I replied, ' but why was he wearing a bow tie and evening suit?' The nurse was dumbstruck and then explained that they had to call him from a very dinner engagement!

I did have a child- a son, Simon, who is now 27. The previous year I had lost a baby, but I know he lives on and one day I will see him. I know I am lucky to have had such a wonderful experience.

Simon describes the impact Elizabeth's experience has had on the family:

Perhaps psychic gifts run in our family. Mum and I will try to call each other at exactly the same time. I know that Mum's experience helped her when the Dad died., as she is now convinced that there's an afterlife. As for me, I used to regularly see his spirit walk in my room when I was a little boy.

Skeptics will of course say that it is all an hallunication, but how could she have possibly have known that her surgeon was wearing a bow tie and evening suit? She was in a coma and having a tracheotomy performed. Elizabeth also knew that is was the police that brought her husband to the hospital, as she overheard the conversation, and also knew the doctor and two nurses tried to resuscitate her heart.

Saturday, April 12, 2008

The simplistic and unscientific claim that more knowledge leads to less religion might be the particular delusion of Dawkins, Myers, and many others, but it is by no means the official position of science, though they often implicitly claim to speak for science. Nor does it stand up to mounds of empirical evidence about the complex relationship between science literacy and public perceptions.

1. The case of Al Sullivan: Al was a 55 year old truck driver who was undergoing triple by-pass surgery when he had a powerful NDE that included an encounter with his deceased mother and brother-in-law, who told Al to go back to his to tell one of his neighbors that their son with lymphoma will be OK. Furthermore, during the NDE, Al accurately noticed that the surgeon operating on him was flapping his arms in an unusual fashion, with his hands in his armpits. When he came back to his body after the surgery was over, the surgeon was startled that Al could describe his own arm flapping, which was his idiosyncratic method of keeping his hands sterile.

2. The case of the Chinese woman: The author Maggie Callanan in her 1993 book, Final Gifts, wrote about an elderly Chinese woman who had an NDE in which she saw her deceased husband and her sister. She was puzzled since her sister wasn't dead, or so she thought. In actuality, her family had hid her sister's recent death from her for fear of upsetting her already fragile health.

3. The case of Pam Reynolds:This is reported by Michael Sabom in his book Light and Death. Pam Reynolds underwent a very risky operation to remove an aneurysm from her brain, in which her brain was drained totally of its blood so that the doctors could clip off the swollen blood vessel. During this procedure, Pam had a deep NDE in which she saw all of the details of the operation and later reported on it with complete accuracy, even though she was "dead" by usual criteria (no heartbeat or respiration, and a flat EEG) for much of it.

4. Cases of the blind who can see: As recorded by Kenneth Ring in his book, Mind Sight, there is solid evidence for 31 cases in which blind people report visually accurate information obtained during an NDE.

28. Consciousness more compatiable with quantum physics then classical physics

http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v2/psyche-2-05-stapp.html

29. You can read the Irreducible Mind Book free herehttp://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=2oV61CeDx-YC&dq=the+irreducible+mind&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=cuxfFcKA4a&sig=zuffEvG_bjQxi8U7sF4Ni1w3LdAfor more evidence that the mind is irreducible to the brain such phenomena they discuss is stigmata, internal impressions etc.

45. Distinguished researches found evidence for survival after bodily death

http://www.aspsi.org/feat/life_after/tymn/testimonials.htm

46. Seeing without eyes

http://www.aspsi.org/feat/life_after/tymn/SEEING_WITHOUT_EYES.htm

47. Various scientific studies on psi and life after death

http://amnap.blogspot.com/search/label/scientific%20studies

48. Animal telepathy

http://amnap.blogspot.com/search/label/animal%20telepathy

49. Neuron firing is indeterminate

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-05/plos-ron050207.php

That is, the behavior of any given neuron and its firing is probabalistic. In other words, sometimes a neuron will fire under stimulus, and other times not. This is almost certainly because neural firing is mediated by the behavior of ions within the synaptic gap, and the behavior of those ions is subject to quantum fluctuations. Because the firing of a single neuron can be amplified through thousands or millions of other neurons throughout large areas of the the brain, and trigger motor neurons, this gives the possibility for individual quantum events to determine gross motor behaviors (shall I give the possible example of neurons controlling muscles in fingers typing a blog entry?). To a large degree, the brain can be seen as a device for magnifying the effects of quantum indeterminancy to the macro-scale, and if those quantum fluctuations are somehow influenced by consciousness, they can use them to drive behavior.

Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Apparently the reviewer believes that the evidence from neuroscience strongly supports the view of extinction he said it's not the final answer he believes. He seems to have no knowledge about the transmission theory if he did then he would realize the evidence of dependency of the mind on the brain can be explained that way too and if psi exists which it appears he never heard of either would show that the mind probably survives death.

He mentions here

As with other reviews of the evidence for survival, this one leaves the reader (this reader, anyway) feeling baffled. The whole weight of modern neuroscience makes survival all but inconceivable

It does? what about the transmission theory that can also accommodate all the evidence for the complete dependency of the mind on the brain?

For example using the television analogy

The vulnerability of consciousness to anesthetics, to caffeine, and to something as simple as a sharp blow to the head, shows its very close dependence on neural activity in the brain.

Damaging the circuitry of a TV set will impair its ability to display an image, but the TV signal is unaffected.

>As brain complexity increases, mental abilities also increase

Why? Because the brain can decode the signal with greater efficacy. To vary the analogy, a powerful radio can pick up more signals than a weak radio. Or to return to TV, a cable-ready TV can pick up more channels than one that is not cable-ready.

>Brain complexity, then, causes mental ability.

Correlation is not causality. Brain complexity is directly proportional to mental ability, but is this complexity necessary to produce consciousness or to receive and decode consciousness?

More information on the transmission theory vs. materialist theories of the mind and brain

can be found here

http://www.survivalafterdeath.org/articles/carter/consciousness.htm - Does Consciousness depend on the Brain?

http://www.survivalafterdeath.org/articles/hart/consciousness.htm - Can Consciousness Survive Destruction of the Brain?

Zack Dunlap doesn’t remember much from the day he died, but he does remember hearing a doctor declare him brain-dead. And he remembers being incredibly ticked off.

“I’m glad I couldn’t get up and do what I wanted to do,” the strapping Oklahoman said in a soft drawl in an exclusive appearance on Monday on TODAY in New York.

And what would he have done, asked TODAY’s Natalie Morales, who has followed Dunlap’s miraculous recovery from a Nov. 17 ATV accident that left him with a catastrophic head injury.

“Probably would have been a broken window they went out,” the 21-year-old said with a hint of a smile.

He’s been through months of rehab, and he’s getting better, but he still has issues with memory and emotional issues.

“I feel pretty good, but this is hard,” he said of all the excitement of being in New York and on national television. He is getting better, he agreed, but said the process is frustrating.

“I just ain’t got the patience,” he said quietly.

He was accompanied by his parents, Pam and Doug Dunlap, and his younger sister, Kacy, who are more than happy to wait while he recovers.

“He’s been doing amazingly well,” Pam Dunlap said. “He does still have a lot of memory issues. It just takes a long time for the brain to heal after such a traumatic injury. It may take a year or more before he completely recovers. But that’s OK. It doesn’t matter how long it takes. We’re just thankful and blessed that we have him here.”

‘There was no activity’Doctors have no explanation for why Dunlap is alive. He had been riding his souped-up ATV with some friends on that fateful Saturday, less than a week before Thanksgiving. They had participated in a parade that morning, popping wheelies and impressing the crowd, and then they had gone out riding on their machines. He did not wear a helmet.

Dunlap fell behind his friends on a highway just outside of Davidson, Okla., not far from his home in the ranching town of Frederick and near the Texas border. He gunned his machine to catch up, doing another wheelie on the back wheels. When he dropped the front wheels back to the pavement, he saw that he was going to crash into a friend’s machine that had stopped a short way up the road.

Dunlap tried to swerve, but flipped his machine and went flying, smashing headfirst and facedown on the asphalt. He remained there motionless, unresponsive to his friends, who quickly called 911.

Taken first to a local hospital, he was airlifted 50 miles away to United Regional Healthcare System in Wichita Falls, Texas, where there was a trauma unit that might be able to treat the severe damage he had done to his brain. But 36 hours after the accident, doctors performed a PET scan of his brain and informed his parents, along with other family members who had gathered to keep vigil at the hospital, that there was no blood flowing to Zack’s brain; he was brain-dead.

Doctors showed the scan to Zack’s parents, and, Doug Dunlap told Morales, “There was no activity at all. No blood flow at all.”

‘They said he was brain-dead’The devastated parents were faced with the horrible decision of either keeping their son hooked up to life-support equipment or pulling the plug and letting his body follow his brain into death.

“We didn’t want him as a vegetable,” Doug Dunlap said. “We didn’t know what he was going to be like. They said he was brain-dead and there would be no life, so we were preparing ourselves.”

Unlike other so called "free energy" technologies, cold fusion refuses to die. The elite media have succeeded in burying other promising innovations, but this one keeps coming back from the grave. And the saga of its development tells us a great deal about the sad state of what passes for science in the world today. To understand what this is all about, we need to take a look at nuclear power in the broad sense. Nuclear power plants today use atomic fission to produce heat to boil water into steam to turn turbines connected to dynamos that produce electricity. The usual fuel is uranium, a heavy element whose nuclei, struck by neutrons, fission into lighter elements and, in the process, release some of what physicists call their "binding energy." Natural uranium is composed mainly of two isotopes, chemically the same, but with different numbers of neutrons in their nuclei. By far the most common is U-238, which can be fissioned, but does not release more free neutrons, so it cannot, by itself, sustain a chain reaction. Mixed in is a small amount of U-235, which does release neutrons. To produce enough power to be really useful, the uranium must be enriched by separating out some of the U-238, which is then called depleted uranium, and has other uses. Left behind is a mixture with a higher percentage of U-235, and this is the reactor fuel. To make a bomb, it would have to be enriched a great deal more. Although technically more difficult, it is also possible to build breeder reactors that convert U-238 into plutonium, which will sustain a chain reaction, or they can be designed to convert the element thorium into the fissionable uranium isotope U-233.

Physicists have known for a long time that it is possible to release binding energy by fusing light nuclei into heavier ones, although it requires an immense amount of heat and pressure to do it. The Sun fuses ordinary hydrogen into helium, but this reaction releases energy at a very slow rate. The deuterium and tritium isotopes of hydrogen are used in the hydrogen bomb, and release energy at an acceptable rate. Beginning in the early nineteen fifties, a heavily funded effort began to develop controlled hydrogen fusion reactors for power, using electromagnetic confinement with powerful fields, or inertial confinement with high energy lasers. After over two generations and billions of tax dollars, the geniuses involved in this lucrative career have failed to make a reaction last longer than a fraction of a second or produce more than a tiny fraction of the energy they have to put into it. There has been time for the grand children of the original researchers to be working on the project, and some of them admit that it may be another fifty years before they even pass the break even point and produce more energy than they consume. Of course, even that would not mean that it was an economical energy source.

For complex theoretical reasons, some physicists have long suspected that it might be possible to achieve a fusion reaction at vastly lower temperatures, if deuterium nuclei were absorbed and trapped between the atoms of certain metals, but it was believed that very little energy could be produced this way. In 1927 a Swedish scientist named J. Tandberg claimed to have made helium from ordinary hydrogen, using palladium electrodes, but was unable to prove it.

Then, in 1989 (nineteen years ago) two lowly chemists at the University of Utah, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, claimed that they were doing an electrolysis of heavy water using palladium electrodes, and that the reaction produced excess heat energy. Now heavy water is deuterium oxide; ordinary hydrogen has a nucleus consisting of one proton; deuterium has a proton and a neutron; and tritium has a proton and two neutrons. Unable to find any other source for the excess energy, they attributed it to cold fusion. Bear in mind that measuring the energy (in this case, electricity) going into a small container in a laboratory and the energy coming out is a relatively simple and well understood procedure, and any scientists worth his salt will test and retest, average results, and make every effort to rule out experimental errors.

Predictably, they were immediately attacked, especially by the hot fusion researchers, whose profitable careers and reputations were on the line. The reaction allegedly produced far more excess energy than cold fusion could, in theory, produce. In addition, while it might seem that two deuterium nuclei (one proton and one neutron each) could happily fuse into one helium nucleus (two neutrons and two protons), theoretical models for cold fusion indicated that there would also be some tritium and some free neutrons, which Fleischmann and Pons did not detect. In addition, the energy should be released as high energy gamma rays, which were not present.

So the attacks were not entirely without justification. But they went far beyond reason, degenerating into personal attacks by mainstream scientists who seemed to feel that, if they could not understand something, it could not exist. This is arrogance and narrow mimdedness that has no place in true science. Researchers at MIT attacked them, and Dr. Koonin of Caltech and Dr. Douglas R.O. Morrison of CERN accused Fleischmann and Pons of incompetence and delusion. The attacks were so virulent, that Dr. Eugene Mallove accused MIT of a fraudulent attack to protect their own hot fusion research, and Nobel Laureate Julian Schwinger accused the debunkers of scientific censorship.

Yet, largely ignored by the controlled elite media, the results were being duplicated elsewhere. Researchers at Texas A&M detected excess heat energy, as did a team at Georgia Tech, although the latter had some doubts. In July, 1989, Dr. Oriani at the University of Minnesota claimed excess energy production. By 1991 ninety two different research groups stated that they had produced excess energy, and some, but not all, reported the production of helium or tritium, or neutrons. Some of these teams, used a gas discharge system rather than an electrolysis system. In 2002 a US Navy laboratory claimed to have produced excess energy with cold fusion, and this was duplicated by the US Department of Energy in 2004. Most recently, a team at Stanford Research Institute, using the electrolysis method coupled with a low energy laser, produced thirty times as much energy as they put into the reaction.

There are really several issues here. Given the state of our economy and our dependence on foreign oil, we have essentally wasted nearly twenty years on a promising technology that, had it been adequately supported early on, might by now have developed into an economical energy source. The narrow mindedness (and, perhaps, dishonesty) of some scientists has been revealed. And this whole saga seems to point at some problem with our basic understanding of physics. For cold fusion may not be fusion at all, but some other process. This should make us wonder about some of the other energy systems allegedly developed in recent years, and perhaps claims of gravity control as well. This could, if the elites allow it (don't hold your breath), lead to an entire host of new technologies and a massive rethinking of basic physics.

As Professor Sir William James pointed out there is more than one imaginable functional dependence of the mind and brain relationship. Now the production theory is more simpler than the transmission theory which is why most neuroscientists are in favor of it however that does not mean it is the correct one.

Evidence that fits into the Transmission theory of the mind and brain for example are

1. The reality of psi has been experimentally established beyond any reasonable doubt, and any viable theory of human personality will have to accommodate this fact.

2. Evidence of post-mortem survival. The amount and quality of such evidence is impressive, although it is little known outside the psi research community. In suggesting that some aspects of mind including procedural and declarative memories may persist independently of the physical organism, it presents the most stark and direct challenge conceivable to prevailing views. Serious and able students of this evidence remain divided about its proper interpretation, but the subject clearly merits intense further investigation.

3. Mystical experience. Previous workers such as William James, Aldous Huxley, and Walter Stace have demonstrated convincingly that there is a fundamental commonality to these powerful experiences which unites them as a class throughout recorded history and across diverse religious cultures. What has not been so clearly recognized is that their strong truth claims receive empirical support from the verifiable effects such experiences produce in the lives of those who have them. These effects may include, for example, incursions of psi abilities, increases in reading speed and other readily-measured cognitive skills, etc. Another relevant feature new since James’ time is that we now have a lot of information about transformative practices, and a large cadre of active practitioners, which should make the phenomena more accessible to study.

4. Near-Death Experiences. At least some such experiences appear to occur under physiological conditions which most neuroscientists would expect to be incapable of supporting any kind of organized mental activity, let alone the complex and powerful experiences that sometimes occur. A recent example is a case reported by Michael Sabom, involving an NDE that occurred during a drastic medical procedure for repair of a cerebral aneurysm (see Bruce Greyson’s presentation). The increasing use of multidimensional physiological monitoring in major surgical procedures can be expected to make additional cases of this important type available for detailed study.

5. Pschyedelic experiences. Huxley’s interpretation of such experiences as resulting from a suspension of the normal "filtering" action imposed by the brain should be revisited in light of more detailed information about the physiological modes of action of specific agents. Ketamine, for example, is a dissociative anesthetic, and a powerful entheogen at subanesthetic doses. It selectively disrupts the NMDA receptor system of the upper cortical layers, which plays a major role in tangential interactions among cortical areas, and yet such interactions are widely presumed to provide the normal physiological basis for organized perceptual and cognitive experience.

6. Multiple personality disorder and trance mediumship. Many unusual phenomena have been reported in such cases which appear to strain conventional theories of overall brain function. For example, in co-consciousness a personality B may be simultaneously aware of its own experience and that of personality A, but not vice-versa. Similarly, when an MPD subject stands in front of a mirror, different "alter" personalities may simultaneously have radically divergent visual experiences, e.g. seeing a young blond female vs. an old dark-haired male. In the case of "Old Stump", described by James, a background personality was apparently unaffected by an illness that produced concurrent delirium in the surface personality. The trance medium Mrs. Piper, discovered by William James, occasionally carried on interactions with three sitters at once, speaking to one and writing messages to the other two using both hands simultaneously. All such cases, conventionally viewed, seem to involve simultaneous engagement of major brain systems in different and potentially incompatible ways.

7. Calculating prodigies, especially "idiot savants". From a neurocomputational perspective, the only way to get greater logical and arithmetic precision out of individually unreliable elements (the neurons) is to use more of them, and the few existing studies of these fascinating phenomena suggest that savants must either be using virtually every neuron they have, or doing their calculations in some radically different way. Functional neuroimaging studies might quickly resolve this.

8. Intentionality, meaning, and the felt unity of conscious experience. The "aboutness" of our mental life, the fact that our thoughts, images, feelings, memories, … are experienced as being directed by ourselves, operating as unitary agents, toward external or internal states of affairs, remains a fundamental mystery despite recent discussions of the "binding problem" etc. These properties are fully present even in the simplest acts of perception, as recognized already by William McDougall in his 1911 book Body and Mind. Recent work on cross-modal interactions in perception has belied earlier characterizations of perception as a bottom-up calculation from the patterns of activity appearing at the receptors, and emphasized the role of top-down controls. But where is the "top", precisely? Philosopher Roland Puccetti has recently updated arguments originally advanced by James’ contemporary F. Brentano to the effect that this property of intentionality lies at the heart of the mind, and that it cannot conceivably arise in ANY physical system as presently understood.

Sunday, April 6, 2008

equipped with an arsenal of unearthly ammo, it's up to agents jay and kay to save the earth from the scum of the universe., yet again. so slip on your shades, choose your favorite man in black, and wield all 6 if his super-cool anti- alien weapons while you right off perps.

like the shark guy and jarra.

remember to enlist the aid of zed as you pursue extraterrestrial ecapees throughout nyc locations, including the nuclear station and the alien space hulk.

Also I have come across this article saying that there are no clear health benefits of drinking water my mother drinks a lot of water and see says her skin feels healthier. Also the article says there is a lack of evidence of health benefits but a lack of supposed evidence not not mean it doesn't have a health benefit. Also I guess we shoudl throw out all the anedoctal evidence that suggest their is a direct health benefit.

Is bottled water better for you than tap? Or should you choose vitamin-enriched water over sparkling? Experts say, skip it all. None of these products are likely to make you any healthier. Below, we look at five major myths about the benefits of drinking water.

But first, how do you know if you're drinking enough water? Experts say there's an easy way to judge. If you're not thirsty, you're fluid intake is likely "just right."

Myth No. 1: Drink Eight Glasses Each Day

Scientists say there's no clear health benefit to chugging or even sipping water all day. So where does the standard advice of drinking eight glasses each day come from? "Nobody really knows," says Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, a kidney expert at the University of Pennsylvania.

Leo- Of course there is health benefits first of all the

Myth No. 2: Drinking Lots of Water Helps Clear Out Toxins

The kidneys filter toxins from our bloodstreams. Then the toxins clear through the urine. The question is, does drinking extra water each day improve the function of the kidneys?

"No," says Goldfarb. "In fact, drinking large amounts of water surprisingly tends to reduce the kidney's ability to function as a filter. It's a subtle decline, but definite."

Myth No. 3: Lots of Water Equals Healthier Skin

The body is already 60 percent water. So, if you take a 200-pound man, he's 120 pounds of water.

Adding a few extra glasses of water each day has limited effect. "It's such a tiny part of what's in the body," says Goldfarb. "It's very unlikely that one's getting any benefit." His full editorial is published in the current issue of the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.

One study published in 2007 on the cosmetic benefit of drinking water suggests that 500 ml of water increases capillary blood flow in the skin. "But it's unclear whether these changes are clinically significant," says Goldfarb.

Myth No. 4: Drinking Extra Water Leads to Weight Loss

A more accurate statement may be: Drinking water is a helpful tool for dieters.

"Water is a great strategy for dieters because it has no calories," says Madeline Fernstrom of the University of Pittsburgh. "So you can keep your mouth busy without food and get the sense of satisfaction."

But water is not magical, she adds. Other zero-calorie options such as diet sodas are fine, too.

Myth No. 5: It's Easy to Get Dehydrated During a Workout

Dehydration sets in when a person has lost 2 percent of his or her body weight. So for a 200-pound man, this means losing 4 pounds of water.

Marathon runners, bikers and hikers all need to recognize the signs of dehydration. "It is also obvious that individuals in hot, dry climates have increased need for water," says Goldfarb.

The American College of Sports Medicine recommends that athletes drink 16 ounces of fluids a couple of hours before starting sports practice.

But for a stroll in the park, no water bottle is necessary. Goldfarb's advice: Just drink when you're thirsty.

Saturday, April 5, 2008

Nearly 150 years after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, evolution has been widely accepted by scientists -- and, except for a few religious dogmatic types, the public -- as the blueprint for the engine of life. But not every scientist thinks that evolution as it's now understood and applied is complete. They want to scale it up to the level of populations, even whole ecosystems. Moreover, they say evolution is intertwined with other dynamics that science is just starting to understand. "The process of evolution is fundamental to the universe. Biology is the most obvious manifestation of it," said Carl Woese, a legendary microbiologist and one of the first proponents of this newly revised evolutionary framework. Darwin described how changes in an organism are passed from generation to generation, dwindling or spreading through populations depending on their contribution to survival. Biologists later combined this with genetics, which had yet to be discovered in Darwin's time. The fusion -- called the modern evolutionary synthesis, or neo-Darwinian evolution -- describes evolution as we now know it: Genetic mutations produce changes that sometimes become part of a species' heritage and, when enough changes accumulate, produce new species. But to Woese and others, change and selection need to be studied at other levels: A honeybee colony, for example, is as much an individual as a single bee. And when explaining how interacting units -- bees, or bacteria, or cells -- produce the qualities of the whole, change and selection alone might not suffice.

What's needed is an understanding of the dynamics of complexity. "There's nothing wrong with neo-Darwinian evolution in its own right," Woese said, "but it's not large enough to encompass what we know now." Woese's specialty is bacteria, and he's not afraid of bold theories that turn conventional scientific wisdom on its head. In 1977, he and colleague George Fox rearranged the animal kingdom from five branches into three, two of which comprise microbes

Thursday, April 3, 2008

check it out here it's sad that this has to happen to a person who really is a nice person but unforunately it does. By the way on a sidenote he does research and experiments into do dogs know when there owners are coming home?

A Lancashire man whose house has a chilling reputation for poltergeist activity claims he is being haunted by text messages from his dead wife, the Blackpool Gazette reports.

Frank Jones, 59, was obliged 12 years ago to have his home in Windsor Avenue, Thornton, exorcised after a malevolent spirit dubbed "The Thing", which had already driven one terrified family from the house, turned its attentions on him and his wife and kids.

In 1971, previous residents the Ross family told the Gazette how The Thing had "pulled at their bed covers while they were asleep" and that they "sensed a vile smell and felt something breathing in their ears".

Jones moved in 20 years ago, solidly sceptical about the legendary presence, but "soon changed his mind". He recounted: "I just thought they were imagining it. But there was a lot of banging and an earthy smell in the house. Then one night I was lying in bed and a mist came across the room. I wanted to shout out at it, but I couldn't get my words out. My face seemed to be paralysed. It all got too much for me when that happened."

Jones's daughter, Maureen, 30, confirmed that The Thing had turned on taps and "ransacked" the house. She said: "You think people are exaggerating until you experience it. I was home alone one evening and suddenly heard these footsteps coming up the stairs. They went into my dad's bedroom and then I heard all the cupboards banging open. It sounded like burglars."

Cue an exorcist from Fleetwood Spiritualist Church, who "cleansed" the property of the spirit "trapped between two worlds".

Peace then reigned in Windsor Avenue until five years ago, when Jones suffered a double tragedy - the death of his son Steven, 32, from a brain tumour and wife Sadie, 69, three months later from a heart attack.

Jones explained: "Just after Sadie died I came home and I felt like I didn't want to go in the house. I got a missed call on my mobile, but it didn't ring. The call was from my own home number, but there was nobody in the house. Then when I went inside there was a smell like cigarettes which Sadie used to smoke and the smell of her perfume."

Jones says his family has since received strange SMS messages which they believe to be from Sadie. He concluded: "She always had a mobile with her. We buried her with her phone. There have been messages with words Sadie would say but there's no number."

I remember back in a youtube video Michio mentioned that he like to see evidence for life after death but there is none. He calls it religious immortality. He says as a scientist there is a problem to the idea of immortality and religious immortality and that is there is no proof that it exists remarkable claims require remarkable proof but maybe you don't need proof but i do.

He is also is a strong supporter of superstring theory.

If only Michio Kaku could look outside the materialist mainstream science opinion but he can't if he did and looked into psychical research and parapsychology and researched it with an open mind he more than likely would come to the conclusion that the view of life after death is more probable than not.

Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Materialists believe that death is the end of our memories, personality, our inner experiences etc.] are they right? with the strong evidence of close correlations between the mind and brain some people believe it's impossible for the mind to survive the destruction of the brain however it also depends on what theory explains that correlation better production theory or the combination theory both theories hold that the mind is extinguish when the brain dies. Here are the three theories that are put forth to explain the mind and brain connection

(1) The Mechanistic Theory holds that the brain is a kind of complicated recording device, with elaborate switches to combine the recordings in various ways, and to produce appropriate outgoing nerve-currents. Consciousness, according to this theory, is merely incidental, like the light which accompanies the burning of wax in a candle-wick. When the burning is put out, the light instantly ceases.

(2) The Psychosomatic Theory holds that consciousness and brain activities are merely two inseparable sides of one reality. This brain-mind combination is not merely mechanical (like a tape-recorder) nor even merely biological. It is psychological in the fullest sense. But when the brain aspect ceases, the mind aspect (according to this theory) must also cease, because brain and mind are merely two different ways of looking at the same process.

(3) The Transmission Theory holds that the 'I' is a separable, self-existent reality, which uses the brain somewhat as a pianist uses a piano, or somewhat as the TV actor uses the television set.